Completing the biggest achievement of my life has left me in the most zombie, emotionally depleted state of my life. Immediately after defending my dissertation successfully, thereby securing my Ph.D. in English, I found myself soft crying into a pillow and trying to find enough stability to reply to all the “congratulations!” text messages pinging on my phone. This emotional release marked the start of what I’ll refer to as my post-PhD depression: a state of aimlessness, premature cynicism, and loss sparked by the contradictory realization that it is all over and yet there is so much more to do. It is like finishing a marathon after giving all you got only to realize you’ve agreed to compete in a triathlon every day for the rest of your career.
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When Panic Attacks by Karen Tang
“I’m dying.” “Why can’t I breathe?” “What is happening to me?”
These are the thoughts that were running through my head as I gasped for oxygen. It happened so fast, it was a blur. One moment I had been actively listening to my client telling me about their issues and then when I had asked what brought them here, their answer, “Oh, I don’t want to be here.” sent my body into overdrive. It hit like a ton of bricks. My hands were shaking and clammy, my heart rate was racing, tears flowed uncontrollably, and my vision blurred. It was so, so hard to breathe, as if I had an elephant sitting on my chest. And it was almost twice as humiliating as we were in the middle of our role-playing clinical interviews class, where I was the therapist and one of my cohort was the patient, with our professor watching from the next room. I was playing the role of the therapist, that means I’m supposed to be in control, right? But I wasn’t. Not even close.
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